Friday, May 10, 2013

A Note on the Provenance of the 'Tyranny' Meme

Have you noticed how many right-wingers are decrying the "tyranny" of the Obama administration these days?

It's particularly rife on the Tea Partying far right, where it's extremely common to hear Obama being portrayed as a "tyrant," particularly regarding his recent attempts to promote gun-control measures. (See Ben Shapiro whining thus in the video above.) So you'll often find crap like this floating about on their Facebook pages.

But it's becoming common among mainstream right-wingers, particularly after the president dismissed these characterizations during a speech at Ohio State. Sure enough, everyone from Jonah Goldberg to Michelle Malkin piled on with the "yeah, whatever you say, dude" retorts.

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny”
under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was
universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for
letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South
Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by
the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that
there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision
for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new
constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race
is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark
warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white
people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a
duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God
has ordained.”
“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the
state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the
“domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous.
“This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over
in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians
denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being
subjected.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white
Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence
that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the
Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead
were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs,
constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose
only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of
disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from
ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend
and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was
nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of
heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry
company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot
in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock
characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low
scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there
were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who
risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice
on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the
sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers,
happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American
promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much
to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the
realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they
would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the
military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing
declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution,
that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote
were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that
their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

Indeed, it's common to hear neo-Confederate agitators -- those folks who are still pushing for modern secession by the South -- describe Lincoln to this day as a "tyrant."

The idea of being governed by a black president? To many of these people even today, that is itself the essence of tyranny.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.